Building an MVVM-based Architecture for Xamarin Mobile Apps

Course Overview
Hi everyone! My name is Gill Cleeren, and welcome to my course, Building an MVVM-Based Architecture for Xamarin Mobile Apps. I'm a. NET Solution architect at Ordina Belgium. People spend more time than ever on their mobile phones using apps. Building great apps is big business. But you'll want to build them right from the first. In this course, we are going to learn how to create a solid architecture using Xamarin and the MVVM pattern as a foundation to build maintainable and testable iOS and Android apps. Some of the major topics that we will cover include build reusable architecture, see how we can apply MVVM to Xamarin, learn about the MvvmCross framework, write unit tests to test our code. By the end of this course, you'll know how you can build your Xamarin mobile apps the right way using an architecture that is built to create maintainable and testable apps. Before beginning this course, you should be familiar with the basics of Xamarin and, of course, some C# as well. I hope you'll join me on this journey to learn Xamarin with the Building an MVVM-based Architecture for Xamarin Mobile Apps course here at Pluralsight.

Introduction
Hello, and welcome to this Pluralsight course titled, Building an MVVM-based Architecture for Xamarin Mobile Apps. My name is Gill Cleeren, and I'll be your instructor for this course. For the next couple of hours, we're going to spend some time together exploring how we can set up an architecture for a real-world Xamarin mobile app. I will explain an architecture and setup I use myself that you can use as a starting point to create your own Xamarin applications. You'll learn that a couple of things are very crucial in this application architecture. We'll see how we can share a maximum amount of code and reduce the platform-specific code to a minimum. We'll see how the MVVM pattern, so the view model pattern, can help us with that. And you'll also learn how this application architecture lends itself to be easy to test and maintain in the long run. If that sounds like a lot of fun, fasten your seatbelt. We're about to take your Xamarin knowledge to the next level. Let's do this. This very first module is a pretty short one. I'm going to give you an overview of the course showing you what exactly you will have learned after watching this course, and that is, of course, if I'm doing a good job teaching you. We're going to be working throughout this course with one single application. At the end of this first module, I'll show you the finished application running both on iOS and Android.

Testing Your Application’s Architecture
Hi and welcome to already the last module of this Pluralsight course titled Building an MVVM-Based Architecture for Xamarin Mobile Apps. I'm Gill Cleeren, and if you have any questions about this course, please contact me via Twitter or let me know via the discussion board here on the Pluralsight website. We now have two fully working apps. The apps are feature complete. So what are we going to be doing in this last module then? We've talked a lot about how the MVVM pattern improves the testability and the maintainability of our code. But we haven't really benefitted from that. We haven't actually written any tests yet. So in this last module, we are going to change that. I'll been showing you how we can write unit tests for both the view models and the service layer in our application. You'll see that the architecture that we have created in this course based on the MVVM lends itself very well to being tested. For the last time, we'll start by exploring this module by looking at the agenda first. Before we start writing unit tests, I'll make sure that you have a basic understanding of why writing unit tests is definitely something you should be doing in your projects. I'll give you a brief explanation first of unit testing. After that, we'll be looking at testing the view models. And, next, as a final topic for this course, we'll be writing some tests for the services. Let's do it.